Heart Candy

The subject of this article or section is part of Love is in the Air, a seasonal event that lasts two weeks. Once the event has run its course, this will no longer be available until next year, but there are no guarantees.

Contents

Heart Candy can be found inside a [Bag of Candies]. Each time the bag is used, one of the eight Heart Candy items is created. In addition to the saying, it also says <Made by Name-of-Character>, the character who opened the Bag of Candies creating the item.

There are eight different Heart Candy items, each with a unique phrase. One is randomly created each time a Bag of Candies is used. Once the Heart Candy item is created, the phrase on that piece of candy never changes.

The Heart Candies are not consumable, thus are not foodcandy. Functionally, they are notes that can be passed to other characters. They do not bind and can be given to other characters, or even passed from character to character, or sold. Beyond that, they are clutter items.

They, however, can not be mailed between characters due to their limited duration.

The Be Mine! World Event achievement for the Love is in the Air event requires you to eat all eight of these items . The odds are good that it will take more than one Bag of Candies to complete the achievement. This is in turn part of the Fool For Love meta-achievement.

As these candy hearts can be traded and auctioned off, it is not truly necessary to open bags of candies to complete this achievement.

The odds of creating any one of the eight on any use of the bag appears to be equal, one in eight of any of them, and after considerable digging, one comment on WoWHead (for the spell, Create Heart Candy, #26678) backs this up, but there does not seem to be a reliable source to verify this with.

Figuring out how long it takes (how many bags, 10 sample each) is intractable if you view it as a multinomial distribution and attempt to follow each branching probability tree. However, the achievement can be viewed as a series of eight binomial distributions; each characterized by a Bernoulli Trial between outcomes "new candy" and "no new candy". Each binomial distribution has an expected time to success of 1/p, p being 8/8, 7/8, 6/8, 5/8, 4/8, 3/8, 2/8, and 1/8, and the expected times are additive, 8/8 + 8/7 + 8/6 + 8/5 + 8/4 + 8/3 + 8/2 + 8/1 . The results is that it on the average takes just over two bags (about 21¾ samples) to complete this achievement.

This can be misleading; there is no cap on how long this can take; the distribution of samples to complete is weighted toward the low end with a shrinking number requiring more and more samples. Think of a long crane arm with a heavy counterweight. The bulk of the people attempting this achievement will complete it with only two bags and a few people will take much longer.